Thud Ridge (4 page)

Fighter pilots call their aircraft birds, and each of our birds has had a name that has sought to point toward some potentially great feature of the machine. The "Thunderbolt," the "Lightning," the "Sabre," were perfect matches of name and appearance. Yet there we were, striking the toughest targets in history, and what were we calling our number one aerial machine of the day? The Thud. Without a doubt, that is the single most unattractive moniker ever attached to a winged craft.

Actually the F-105's given name was the "Thunderchief." It came from the publicity office of its manufacturer, Republic Aviation Corporation, and the name stuck for a while during the long struggle that any machine should go through from the drawing board to the flight line. The Thud came from a long line of good aircraft. They have always been comparatively big, heavy, sturdy and most capable of doing the job they were designed for. They have never been the lightweight, turn-on-a-dime delight of the acrobatic champion, but then they were never built to be. The P-47, nicknamed the Jug, with its big radial engine out front, did its job in World War II and the first time I strapped a Jug to me I thought it was the biggest thing I had ever seen. I saw a restored Jug at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base a couple of years ago, and by then it looked like a little bird. The Jug was as true as they come and after some eight hundred hours of flying time in it I had learned my first lesson in respect for Republic products.

After the Jug came the Republic F-84 series of jet fighter aircraft, some of which were good, some not so good. Some of them earned names like Super Hog and Lieutenant Eater and none of the pilots felt at all bad when one series of the F-84 was hauled away on flat-bed railroad cars and used as targets for fire-power demonstrations. Other models were superb, such as the ones I used in Korea to test a new air-to-ground rocket after I had finished my Korean tour in F-80's and the ones we used as our first aircraft in the acrobatic demonstration team.

The Thud did not do too well at the start as the birds were plagued with problems in both the airframe and the engine. It is a complicated machine and in many supply and maintenance areas we were not prepared to handle this degree of sophistication. The constant struggle to keep the early models in the air did not go without notice and the unromantic Ultra Hog was a natural name which stuck for some time. One of the saddest days in the Thud's history followed the Air Force's efforts to modernize the aerial demonstration team— the Thunderbirds—and enhance the sagging reputation of the Thud at the same time. Unfortunately, there was a lack of proper homework in the selection and assignment of specific aircraft to the demonstration team and the venture was unknowingly doomed from the start. My old command, the Thunderbirds—with my old acrobatic wingman and dearest friend, Lucky Palmgren, at the helm—worked their hearts out getting the show and the people ready. The stripped-down bird performed beautifully and the tremendous engine power and the skill of the pilots resulted in a demonstration that amazed almost everybody. The Thud turned, looped and rolled with the utmost grace, and everything looked rosy. On the first trip, Gene Devlin, one of the team members, streaked in over the runway at Hamilton Air Force Base. As he pitched out of formation to land, the aircraft suffered a major structural failure that should have been detected beforehand. One of our best men was killed, shocking many spectators and fellow pilots throughout the world. That was the end of the Thud as far as the Thunderbirds were concerned and the Ultra Hog was a tough item to defend.

But for the challenge of the air war in the North, I guess the Thud would show in most people's books as a loser. Struggling under a bombload that was huge for a fighter, the Thud waded into the thick of the fray and those not in the know coined the name Thud—with all its derogatory connotations. But gradually a startling fact became apparent—the Thud was getting to North Vietnam as nothing else could. Nobody could keep up with the Thud as it flew at high speed on the deck, at treetop level. Nobody could carry that load and penetrate those defenses except the Thud. Sure we lost a bundle of them and lost oh so many superior people along with the machines, but we were the only people doing the job, and we had been doing it from the start. There were other aircraft carrying other loads and performing other functions, pushing a lesser portion of explosives to the North, but it was the old Thud that day after day, every day, lunged into that mess, outdueled the opposition, put the bombs on the target and dashed back to strike again. Any other vehicle in anybody's Air Force today simply could not have done the job.

The record of the Thud versus the Mig bears additional comment. It can be a bit difficult to knock down a clear-weather, air-to-air fighter, such as the Mig, with a heavy, complex fighter-bomber, and that's not the primary job of a fighter-bomber anyway. Thuds have knocked down more Migs than any other aircraft in Southeast Asia but only a few Thuds have fallen before Mig attack. The Thud has made an impression on even those flying for North Vietnam—whoever they may be. Yes, the Thud has justified herself, and the name that was originally spoken with a sneer has become one of utmost respect throughout the air fraternity.

I want to tell you about the Thud drivers. I want you to feel and see some of what they felt and saw. I want you to see some of the things this highly experienced group of combat pilots, whose average age was thirty-five, fought for and fought against. I want to give you a feel for the way those of us who devoted our careers to fighter aircraft and their tactical employment wanted to do the job and I want to expose you to the oversupervision and the costly, restrictive attitudes imposed by our strategically or administratively oriented supervisors.

How do the Thud drivers and their charges fit in with what's going on in Southeast Asia? To begin with, there were at least four separate and completely different air wars (if you disregard the spooky stuff, which we will not talk about). There was a war in the South; a support war; a war in the easy part of the North; and the tough air war of the far North. First of all, there was the war down South, the bitter and ill-defined struggle that made all the magazines and papers day after day, the war in support of the crunchies slogging back and forth in the practice of the second oldest profession. It was the war of air strikes against specific positions in conjunction with ground force attacks. It was an all-day and all-night air war conducted close to the home airport of the fighter and in a quite permissive atmosphere—permissive in the sense that you could make mistakes and talk about them later. For instance, if you got zingoed on your ninth strafing pass on the same target by some guy with a pistol, you had a good chance of riding home in a chopper—in one piece. Your air discipline could bend and you could still get the job done with only a slight chance of really grim results. Altitude restrictions to avoid gunfire from the ground went somewhere way in the back of the pilot's head, and the names Sam and Mig were heard only in bull sessions. Yet the short round on an improper target hurt, and the intense supervision and less than understandable interplay between services and nations made a demanding job for the pilot. This air war I will not discuss. They lived sort of dirty—but they didn't have to fight too dirty. Their aircraft and pilot loss rate was less than the loss rate in the training program in the States.

Another war in the air of Southeast Asia that you should be exposed to is what I refer to as the support war. This was a vast operation, and the tonnages hauled and the sick and healthy people shuttled back and forth were quite impressive. The formal military airlift program expanded to monstrous proportions and seemed to be getting the job done. The heavy reliance on civilian carriers must have made lots of people happy, but many of the military people got just as unhappy with this government-sponsored civilian airlift scheme, especially when they stood on one foot and then the other, wanting to get somewhere and then saw a civilian super jet going to their desired destination devoid of anything but crew and stewards; they couldn't get on board because they were not on "funded" orders.

In other words, the U. S. paid for the aircraft and the crew, and the military airlift people controlled the booking, but the same military people would not fill an empty seat with a military man from Thailand who had a few days off unless he was on official ("funded") business. Seems sort of silly to hire a vehicle and run it at less than the maximum capacity. The crew couldn't have cared less, but the rules were the rules. It was definitely half a war in many commonsense areas like this. The people in Thailand had none of the goodies such as Rest and Recreation—R and R, that is—so the combat crews who fought the air war over Hanoi were
personae non grate
with the Military Airlift Command people.

Local unit support fits into this picture and a great mass of people not assigned to the formal military airlift effort were involved in flying the original C-47 gooney bird or some more sophisticated model thereof. Each unit and headquarters had many runs that just had to be made, rather like running the family car to the drugstore, the post office, and so on. We needed them, and there were many highly dedicated people in this endeavor, but there were some there who never seemed to make the combat team and who adhered closely to the business-as-usual approach, no matter what the operation— and even they managed an air medal now and then. I don't envy them and I think that support flying is not so pretty good. I wouldn't change places for anything.

Next in this tour is the third air war, the easy route packages—the Thud driver's definition of the southern parts of North Vietnam. North Vietnam was divided into six numbered areas, from 1 in the south to 6 in the north. This was a matter of administrative convenience, but the intensity of the defenses went up with the Route Package number. The easy southern Route Packages have cost many a man and many a machine, but although they could be most deceptive, those who fought their war there did not face the ever-present pressure for split-second timing, and the exposure rate allowed more ease of maneuver without the Sam and Mig. threat. We used that area as check-out grounds for our new F-105 sports. A pilot needs a few rides to get in shape, just like an athlete, and this was the place for our warm-ups. You can get into real trouble on the simplest of combat missions (I guess even our B-52 crews faced some problems, like stepping on each other's fingers reaching for the coffeepot and things like that). The BUPs have been this far north a few times, while the world stood still, the monkeys trembled and the toothpick manufacturers cursed their ill-chosen, old-fashioned production methods. (BUF stands for big ugly fellows in polite conversation, but is suitably amplified in true fighter conversation. This terminology irritated the big load drivers, and the Strategic Air Command general in charge of their operation issued an edict that the B-52 "Stratofortress" was not to be referred to as a BUF. His edict received amazingly little attention outside the strategic empire.) It is great sport to barb our fellow aviators on their operational areas, and there are many who would respond eagerly should the bell ring for something better, but face it we must, the toughest area for the BUF's and for many fighters other than the F-105 was our training ground. It was where we went when operational conditions were unacceptable in the big league.

And the fourth air war was the big league. The true air war in the North. The desperate assault and parry over the frighteningly beautiful, green-carpeted mountains leading down into the flat delta of the Red River. The center of hell with Hanoi as its hub. The area that was defended with three times the force and vigor that protected Berlin during World War II. The home of the Sam and the Mig, the filthy orange-black barking 100-millimeter and 85-millimeter guns, the 57- and 37-millimeter gun batteries that spit like a snake and could rip you to shreds before you knew it, the staccato red-balled automatic weapons that stalked the straggler who strayed too low on pullout from a bomb run, and the backyard of the holders of rifles and pistols who lay on their backs and fired straight up at anyone foolish or unfortunate enough to stumble into view. This was the locale of Thud Ridge.

For those of us who fought there, geography was a basic fact of life. On the west, the Red River meanders out of the mountains and valleys that form the northern extremity of North Vietnam and the southern flank of Communist China. Nine-thousand-foot mountain peaks that are cut in places like the teeth of a giant saw lie to the southwest of the Red and separate it from its parallel traveling companion, the Black River. The stark peaks, deep river gorges and green unrelenting jungle were something to see from the air at 500 knots plus—that's the only way. Our area of concern started along the Red River slightly north of a place we called the Brassiere, a well-defined pair of hooks in the river surrounding the viscous little town of Yen Bai. As a fighter pilot, you couldn't work too far north of there without taking the chance of stepping on your necktie along the Chinese-border buffer zone, an unpardonable sin. I guess we are not giving away too much in operable infantry-type ground in our self-imposed buffer zone, a big fat 30-mile-wide strip of mountain territory that follows the Chinese border all the way across North Vietnam to the Gulf of Tonkin, but it does include many heavily traveled roads and rail lines stretching to the border of China and it provides a sizable hunk of free airspace for Mig sanctuary when things are not going the Migs' way.

Yen Bai was one of the Thud drivers' pet dislikes. It has the reputation of being Ho Chi Minh's hometown and the way they shot from there you'd think it was manned by the Turkish brigade protecting Ataturk's tomb. Maybe they had a statue of Ho down there—they sure seemed to be protecting something. I have been there many times and from the air it seemed that all you were battling was the guns. The rail line was dumpy and beaten up and the roads were dirt, as they are most everywhere in North Vietnam (don't let those lines on the map representing roads fool you). Regardless of what they were protecting, Yen Bai was not the spot to wander over, or even near. If you came within a few miles, they would shoot and shoot hard, whether they had the slightest chance of hitting you or not. I swung about 3 miles north of there while inbound to a target one day and they opened up with everything they had despite the fact that we were far out of their range. The situation gave me the opportunity to study the ground defense pattern with relative impunity and I believe they were simply shooting straight up in the air. They unleashed volley after volley and the muzzle blasts of the big guns sparkled clearly from all sides of the town and from the center. The smaller-caliber guns spat from around every house in town and the place looked like a giant short circuit, yet all the bursts were directly over the top of Yen Bat and far from us. They were still shooting as they faded behind us and I often wondered how much of that jagged metal fell back on top of their heads. Maybe that was why they were always so mad up there—they shot straight up and clobbered themselves.